


One Night with the King

by ehmazing



Category: Galavant (TV)
Genre: Childhood Friends, F/M, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 23:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5888557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehmazing/pseuds/ehmazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, more precisely: a dozen awkward playdates; roughly ten seconds of accidental eye contact; inappropriate dreams of various lengths scattered over a period of nearly twenty years; a brief yet emotionally-stirring speech; six weeks of questing, camping, and sexual tension; and one night, with the king.</p><p>[Spoilers for the s2 finale.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Night with the King

The first time Roberta set foot in the castle she was seven years old, short-haired, and covered in mud. Barn mud, actually, the worst kind of mud that small girls can be covered in when they are called to an audience with the king, and she desperately hoped that there were no laws decreeing that making the royal carpets smell of cow is punishable by execution. Her father was a noble, after all, and he taught her that there were many, many things in their country punishable by execution.

One of which is refusing a royal summons. The summons specifically meant for her twin brother, Robert Steingass the Fourth, future earl, currently sick at home with chicken pox. When the royal messenger had arrived, her father glanced at his son (attempting to scratch at his arms with hands that had been stuffed into oven mitts to prevent said scratching) then at his daughter (freshly returned from wrestling with the cow herder in the barn) and decided that it was better to risk offending the king’s nose than infecting him with the child plague.

“And if the anyone asks,” he assured his wife, “we’ll just say we were confused. After all, they’re both called ‘Bobby.’”

So Roberta was set on the back of the messenger’s horse and spirited away to the capital.

After being led through more fine rooms than she’d ever seen in her life, she was ushered into a small hall and told to wait—and not touch anything else with her grubby hands. For the first fifteen minutes she obeyed, standing as still and straight as a statue, but alas the patience of seven-year-olds wears thin easily. She had scaled halfway up the tapestry on the far wall when she was startled into falling by a rough “ _Oy_!”

When she’d scrambled to her feet, she turned to face the speaker. He was a boy who could not have been much older than twelve, yet was somehow already as broad and stocky as a tree stump. His face had the look of someone who knew they were destined to grow frown lines later in life and was already intent on earning them.

“My king!” she squeaked, dropping into her best curtsy, which looked somewhat absurd given that she was wearing trousers. “P-pardon me for—“

The tree stump snorted, trying on a deeper scowl.

“I’m not the king.” He stepped aside and revealed to a smaller, rounder boy behind him. “He is.”

Roberta had been taught to bow her head when addressing a member of the royal family, which made it more difficult to study King Richard as he approached her. She had always assumed that the two princes would be like her and her brother: they would be shrunken, scruffier copies of their father, with Prince Kingsley having only the height of his few bonus years to set him and the younger Richard apart. Indeed, spying Prince Kingsley at his father’s side during a tournament last year seemed to confirm her hypothesis. He was the king in miniature, complete with a cruel, disdainful attitude that held the promise of blossoming into a full haughty, kingly air.

But she had been entirely wrong about Richard. He was a polished apple to his guard’s tree stump, a likeness only heightened by how the bright red color of his ruffled velvet doublet made his round cheeks look even pinker. Though he did his best to look down on her, the nervous shuffling of his feet made it seem like he was trying to embody a royal role that he was never meant to play.

“You,” the king said finally, “are not Bobby Steingass.”

“I am, my king,” she replied, more confident now that short, pink King Richard did not seem half as frightening as the neighbor boys she and her brother trounced in the stables on a regular basis. “Maybe not the Bobby Steingass you thought, but still a Bobby Steingass. Though,” she added, afraid she might’ve overstepped, “my grandmother does say my parents were just too lazy to come up with two different nicknames, so she calls me Roberta.”

The king pursed his lips, considering this information. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m too lazy to come up with anything either, since I’m a king and kings don’t care about the names of peasant girls.” His nose wrinkled and he took a step backward. “Especially peasant girls who smell like horse farts.”

Roberta was about to retort that she was an earl’s daughter, not a peasant girl, and she smelled like cow farts, not horses’, but the tree stump caught her eye and drew a finger across his throat. She stayed silent.

Satisfied, the king clapped his hands together and smiled. “Now, Bobby-Steingass-whose-name-I-don’t-care-about, we’re going to play Go Fish, and you’re going to let me win while Gareth—“ he nodded at the boy guard, “—helps me cheat. Got it?”

Again Roberta wanted to protest that cheating was essentially useless when she was already ordered to lose, but she didn’t need a threat to tell her to shut up this time. She merely curtseyed again and said, “Yes, my king.”

After several hours of letting Gareth look over her shoulder and call out which cards she held, Roberta was rather glad to be dismissed. While she and her brother fought against each other more often than with each other, it was at least more fun to get beaten in games if you could give back as good as you got. When the next summons came, she was all too eager to let Robert (scrubbed clean from head to toe) take his rightful place on the messenger’s jeweled saddle.

So she was just as bewildered as everyone else when he came back within the hour, with a message that they had sent the wrong Bobby Steingass.

* * *

Roberta had never been very good at accepting what her mother called “the burden of period-appropriate sexism.” Fitting into the feminine niche felt impractical; skirts and dresses tore more easily than trousers, hairpins did not stab as neatly as swords. She was rubbish at weaving and useless at darning, but she could split wood and shoot an arrow with practiced ease. Her mother constantly fretted that it was only a matter of time before she came home with a girl stolen from the nunnery and announced she was a lesbian.

(She wasn’t. Though Roberta thought it best to not to mention that she had in fact played several sapphic rounds of spin-the-bottle at Lady Catherine’s sweet sixteen slumber party and thoroughly enjoyed it. Instead she retorted that associating tomboy fashion and masculine hobbies with lesbian behavior was both stereotyping and homophobic, period-appropriateness be damned.)

Her father was far more lax. “Let her be, Lavinia,” was his constant refrain. “The land and the title will all go to Bobby, so what does it matter if Bobby doesn't adhere to medieval gender roles?"

Her mother would sigh, then frown and say, “Wait, did you mean Bobby or Bobby?”

By the time she was of marriageable age they had reached a tentative truce: her mother would let Roberta ride horses without a side-saddle and wear more knives than jewels, and Roberta would keep her hair long and don skirts and rouge when they had to appear at court. At least she had the comfort of knowing her brother—who had developed a distaste for any activity that took him away from reading his imported Eastern picture books—was as miserable in a starched ruff and velvet doublet as she was in her stays and petticoats.

It was no surprise then, that on the night before he was scheduled to fight in the national tournament Robert snuck into her room and begged her to take his place.

“I hate jousting, Bobby,” he pleaded. “Armor makes my skin chafe and holding the lance strains my drawing hand.”

“Then you’ll have to take a break from drawing so many half-dressed girls from your comics,” she sniffed, brushing a particularly nasty snarl out of her hair. “By the way, gravity doesn’t work on breasts that way."

“For the last time, they aren’t comics, they're manga!” Robert pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fine, we’ll do this your way. You can have my best bow.”

Roberta kept brushing as she countered, “Your best bow and six weeks of doing all my needlework.”

“Two weeks.”

“Five.”

“Two and a half.”

“Five.”

“Three, last offer.”

Roberta set down the brush. “Three weeks, your bow, and that new sword you special-ordered from overseas.” Robert paled.

“I am not giving you my katana! That cost three years of my inheritance!” Roberta shrugged and reached for a hairpin, waiting. Finally, her brother sighed.

“Three weeks of needlework, my bow, and…my katana.” He gave her a dark look. “But only if Mum and Dad don’t find out.”

They set the plan in motion at breakfast the next morning. When offered her share of porridge, Roberta groaned and clutched at her stomach.

“No thanks,” she moaned, “I don’t feel well. I think I’m having…” she threw a sidelong glance at her mother, _“lady troubles.”_

Sympathy thus gained, she made sure to protest missing the tournament just enough to throw off suspicion. Then it was only a matter of waiting until the carriage had left the gate, shimmying out the window, and stealing her favorite horse. She arrived at the fairgrounds only a few minutes behind her family.

Robert met her at their designated spot behind the mutton vendor to give her his armor.

“Now remember,” he said, helping her stuff her hair under the helmet, “don’t fight too well, or they’ll know it isn’t me.”

Roberta rolled her eyes. “I know, I know, I’ll suck on purpose. Now go hide before anyone sees us.”

The coast clear, she saddled Robert’s horse and waited for her round to be called. Roberta hoped the switch would work. They had done it several times when they were younger, but in the pre-puberty days it was far easier to swap clothes when neither of them had breasts or hips to worry about. She fidgeted in the saddle, cursing her shoulders for managing to grow broader than her brother’s chest plate had room for.

“Robert Steingass the Fourth!”

She did as her brother instructed and didn’t fight at full strength. She won the first and second rounds, faked tiring in the third and won by only a technicality, figuring it was something Robert could likely pull off. She determined she would lose on the fourth round, getting just far enough that her parents would be pleased with her brother’s progress but remain unsuspecting of who was really under the helm. She idled on the sidelines as she waited for the next challenger, staying in the saddle to give her a better vantage point for people-watching.

That’s when she saw him.

It had been years since she was last called to the castle. The ordered playdates tapered off when the Queen Mother began weaning Richard off of the regency in his fifteenth year, putting him fully in Kingsley's place when the latter insisted on leaving to make his name in the world of war. Roberta had actually felt relieved when Prince Kingsley departed for the front, remembering how he was prone to kicking her and the other children just because he felt like it.

(Granted, King Richard had also kicked her once or twice, but he’d made Gareth do it because he personally refused to hit a girl.)

She was more relieved that Richard's new duties to the crown meant she would no longer be obligated to find new ways to fail at every game from checkers to freeze tag. In her last memory of him, Richard had still been pudgy and pink-cheeked. If asked to describe him at twenty-five, Roberta would’ve guessed that the king would remain more or less the same.

In reality, she never would’ve recognized him had it not been for Gareth. He’d grown into his frown lines after all, lengthening from a tree stump into a solid log. His shaved scalp jutted out strikingly from the noble heads that surrounded him. If he was here, then the man in the chair beside him would naturally be the king.

The king who used to pull her braids. The king who she had given a silly nickname to. The very tall, very neatly-bearded, very much-better-looking-than-he-had-any-right-to-be king.

The king who was staring directly at her, as he and the crowd wondered why on earth Robert Steingass the Fourth had not approached his opponent as the announcer called his name for the third time.

Oh. _She_ was Robert Steingass the Fourth. Shit.

“When you said you would suck on purpose, I didn’t think you meant you would make me look like a complete jackass out there,” Robert hissed at her when she met him again to switch back. She slammed the helmet over his face.

“Just say you felt concussed after the third round,” she snarled. “You always skip your leechings, they’ll buy it.”

Though she had planned on hanging around the fairgrounds just for fun afterward, Roberta opted now to hop back on her horse and head straight home. It would give her more time to clean up before her family returned, she told herself. She could stop by that stream in the woods and have a long, cold bath.

But like the tournament, even her best-laid plans seemed to be going awry. She was still warm and flushed when her mother came to check on her that night, laying a hand on her forehead and clucking sympathetically about her “lady troubles.”

Lady troubles indeed.

* * *

Even before she joined her countrymen in adopting a democratic government, Roberta had been no real fan of the monarchy. Of course coming from a long line of landowners she lived a fine, (mostly) disease-free life, but when your sparring partners and drinking buddies at the tavern are all complaining about how today’s mud pie had even less grass than yesterday’s, you tend to become sympathetic towards the lower classes.

Still, she was raised with a healthy sense of where she belonged in the pecking order, and that meant knowing exactly how much dissent you could get away with. A joke about how the lord’s shoes cost more than what selling all of his vassals' firstborns would fetch? Perfectly acceptable at high society dinner parties. Allowing your scullery maids to join the union? Questionable, but it was almost impossible to hire them freelance anymore.

Constantly thinking of new scenarios in which you ride full-tilt to the castle, straddle the king on his throne, and ravish him senseless despite being three social classes beneath him? Definitely frowned upon.

Roberta doubled the length of her training regimen. She learned staff fighting, knife-throwing, boxing. In less than two months she wielded Robert’s katana with a skill that surpassed most men who’d trained with local blades for years. She could break a block of wood with her palm. She could snap a man’s neck with her thighs. She exercised for hours every day so that at night, she had a better chance that exhaustion would lull her to sleep before her brain could start working out the details of how the king’s beard would feel against her bare thighs as he kissed down—

No! Bad! Not for 12+ audiences!

The dreams weren’t constant, thankfully. The first round petered off within six months of that first tournament sighting. For a few years she lived in bliss, thinking they were over for good. But then on her twenty-sixth birthday there came news that the king had repealed the law forbidding marriages between noble and common bloodlines. His reason, apparently, was that, “No law of God or man should stand in the way of true love. And to be honest, I just felt like mixing things up a little.” Back into the gutter went her subconscious.

The same happened five years later when there was a rumor that he buried his former wet nurse with honors befitting a duchess; now all the fantasies starred the king in lush black silk. She found she could turn this bad habit off faster by volunteering to fight in a minor border skirmish. The tradeoff was that sight of dead, gutted men rotting in the sun killed all thoughts of sex in general for the next several years, but it worked nonetheless.

The final straw came in 1255, when Roberta was recovering from a particularly nasty fight with her parents (the topic unchanged since she was seventeen: when would she finally stop acting like a knight and start acting like an unmarried woman desperate to produce offspring with the nobleman of their choosing?) at her favorite tavern when she spied a notice on the wall. It reminded patrons that the latest medical studies funded by the king had found that heavy drinking was dangerous to pregnant women and children, so could those parties please stick to light ales and wine?

So he was romantic, generous, family-oriented, and supported modern science. Roberta fought the urge to dump her own flask over her head.

Perhaps if she had stewed in that cocktail of lust and slight desperation for only a while longer, Roberta would have acted on her fantasies. Perhaps if left alone for another month, even another week she would have snapped and stuffed an overnight bag, caught the next carriage to the capital, and sent her parents a raven saying, “Sorry to move out on such short notice, going to try my hand at being a mistress, give Bobby my love.” Perhaps she would have convinced herself that it was possible for a king and a wild-haired, sword-swinging, anachronistically progressive earl’s daughter to fall in love like people did in fairytales.

But she didn’t. When she came home from the tavern that evening, her parents had decided to drop the earlier fight entirely, too giddy over a gilded slip of parchment that had been delivered in her absence.

It announced that at last, the kingdom had a queen.

* * *

Truth be told, no one knew exactly how it happened. Rumor had it that the king had fallen madly in love with Madalena, a peasant girl from the lower valley, and was willing to kneel in the dirt road to beg her for her hand. Another rumor had it that he’d simply thrown her into the carriage and Madalena went through with the wedding anyway because she was a materially-minded narcissist with a strong side dish of sadistic tendencies. Either way, when her portrait appeared on the limited-edition honeymoon currency it was clear to all that the new queen was young, fair, and beautiful.

Roberta’s age was now nearer to forty than thirty, she freckled as soon as she stepped into the sun, and she had once overheard some drunken squires rate her boobs as “four out of ten: cute, but too average.” It wasn’t hard to see why she didn’t have kings asking for her hand and kidnapping her regardless of the answer.

Moving on wasn’t difficult. She hadn’t been completely hopeless in the romance department all these years. There’d been a few people in her life before, and she knew there could be more if she put a little effort into it. (Maybe slightly more effort into men than women, since the declaration of war on Valencia meant that the population scales were about to be drastically tipped in favor of the fairer sex.) It helped immensely to remind herself that any man who condoned baby fights was not worth fantasizing about.

Months passed. The war dragged on with no word from the king or queen, and people began discussing what to do if they never returned. King Richard had gotten rid of most of his advisors during his late teenage years, abolishing the cabinet because they “weren’t his real dad,” so there was no one left to seize power in his absence. Public support of the monarchy waned, then dwindled, then sputtered out like a candle wick swallowed by its own melted wax. By the time Roberta’s family cropped the royal insignia off their official stationary, she had nearly forgotten that there had ever been a king in her life. Turns out there’s nothing quite like a national revolution to ease a broken heart.

But there were pros and cons to democracy. The pros were that without an official class system in place, Roberta could now work and live as she pleased. The cons were that she was still a woman and had no property or legal standing. But being able to finally move out of her parents’ house was a start, at least.

Robert felt the same. His red hair disqualified him and her father from voting, but he couldn’t be more thrilled. Only a few days after she had settled into a small village apartment, he came to her door wearing his sturdiest boots and a traveling pack slung over his shoulder.

“I’m heading east,” he said. "Now that inheriting the estate means essentially nothing, I’m free to pursue my dream of becoming a true mangaka.” His smile was so bright that Roberta didn’t have the heart to tease him. Instead she yanked her twin into her arms and wrapped him in a tight hug.

“You’ll be great, Bobby,” she said, her throat and eyes beginning to burn. “I’ll miss you."

“I’ll miss you too, Bobby,” he said, giving a strangled little laugh that betrayed his own feelings. “Can you believe we’ve never been separated before now?”

She hugged him tighter. “We’ll be alright. Make sure you write to me, and Mum and Dad too.” Her brother was silent. “Don’t give me that, you know they’ll worry.” Still nothing. “Oh come on, Bobby, don’t start with the cold shoulder thing now. Say something!"

Robert managed at last to groan weakly, “I can’t, Bobby, you’re crushing me.”

“Oh! Sorry.”

She insisted on giving him more provisions for the road, along with a spare dagger and vial of Auntie Hannah’s Ole Pepper Spraye, just in case. She wanted to see him off to the caravan station, but Robert waved off her concern and saddled his horse alone.

“I was never as good a knight as you are, but I can take care of myself,” he chuckled. “Goodbye, Bobby!”

Roberta managed to hold off the tears until the road took him over the hills and out of sight.

* * *

Life went on. She joined the citizen militia. While on occasion she was called upon to take out a bandit den or two, there were few real battles to fight now that the country's entire armed forces were stationed in Valencia. She earned most of her income from teaching fencing lessons at the rec center. With her brother unavailable, she even finally learned to darn stockings with passable competence. It was not a very exciting life, but it was pleasant one and she was happy.

She should have guessed there would be a plot twist waiting around the corner.

Enter: Sir Galavant.

He had given her a brief sales pitch in the street, trying to drum up votes before the election scheduled for later in the afternoon. She smiled and nodded politely through his tale of how his sweetheart was savagely ripped from his arms and taken to be wed to a prince she didn’t love, but she thought it was remarkably similar to his quest from last year. Couldn’t he spice his plotlines up a little?

“No, look, there’s dramatic irony in it,” Galavant insisted when she voiced this opinion. “You see, my original questing party was myself, my squire, and the princess, but now this time it’s myself and King Richard. He pulled a Heel-Face Turn at the end of last year and now he’s promised to help me find an army to free the land he once brutally conquered. Unexpected, right?”

“King Richard?” Roberta felt suddenly dizzy. “Is here? With you?”

“Yes,” said Galavant. “And I know all of you are enthusiastic about this 'power for the people' schtick, but please don’t go all French on him and cut any royal heads off. He’s kind of collateral for me right now.”

Roberta frowned. “Is…is cutting off the heads of kings common in France?”

Galavant snorted. “No, but I wouldn’t put it past them to make a habit of it in the future. Crazy cheese-loving bastards.”

The dizziness only worsened as the meeting started. She could barely concentrate on the local matters (which didn’t make much of an impact on the proceedings, as she had no say in any of them) and struggled not to turn in her seat and examine the crowd behind her for one familiar face. The facts flew through her head like a storm. King Richard was here with Sir Galavant. King Richard had left his tyrannical wife and fled Valencia. King Richard was on a quest to redeem himself and become a hero. King Richard was striding past her right now, throwing aside a cheap beer bottle as he took the stage and began lecturing.

King Richard was asking who would fight for true love.

Roberta’s greatest strength was unfortunately also her greatest character flaw: a tendency to act on instinct. It served her well in battle but also made her prone to leaping headfirst with both eyes closed. Sometimes it saved her life; sometimes it nearly killed her. But she was no longer a young woman who considered running away from home just because of a few wet dreams. She was an adult, and she knew very well that she could act rashly without thinking, and she knew she shouldn’t just say whatever first came into her head as she looked at—

The king’s eyes met hers.

Roberta stood up, and pledged herself to a quest.

* * *

She thought it would be awkward when he first found out, but Richard was delighted. (Galavant had taken her aside when they made camp on the first night and begged her to stop with the “my king” business. “Please, for the sake of his ego and my sanity, just call him Richard like everyone else,” he said seriously. Roberta was too embarrassed that she’d reverted to that old habit in the first place to argue.)

“I remember the day when your parents sent your brother,” he told her, chuckling, “and immediately when I saw him I knew how you’d been sent to me by mistake the first time. You know, your parents really were quite lazy about the name thing. You’d think they at least could’ve called one of you ‘Rob’ or ‘Bertie.’"

Roberta shrugged, having heard this too many times before. “They weren’t expecting twins. Robert was born first, and when I came after him they were so shocked that they asked the midwife if it was a prank. My father wanted to name me after my mother, but she thought having two children named after themselves was a bit creepy, so ‘Roberta’ it was. I think they kept calling us both ‘Bobby’ because we were indistinguishable until we were ten.”

“But that’s even worse!” Richard protested. “No child should just be treated like a copy of their sibling.”

Roberta bent down with the excuse of adjusting her stirrups, trying to hide the warmth spreading over her cheeks.

Soon it was as if no time had passed at all. They were repeatedly told off by Galavant for breaking quiet hours as they traded stories and laughed together long after the campfire died down to a few glowing coals. She told him about her brother and his comics, about her early days of knighthood, about constantly fending off her parents’ requests to set her up with a nice doctor. Alright, so maybe she was laying the hints on a little too thickly, but Richard had brought up the topic of significant others first after he’d told her the entire Madalena story.

“She used to dump the chocolates I got her right into the toilet while I was watching," he sighed. "I mean, I know I tore her away from her friends and family and the only home she'd ever known, but she could never let anything go.”

Roberta patted his shoulder sympathetically while Galavant announced that now that the mood had been sufficiently killed, he was going to ride out of earshot of the two of them from now on. As he spurred his horse forward, he looked back at her with a face that said he knew what she was really up to.

She felt bad, but not bad enough to forgive him for that disastrous matchmaking musical number.

As soon as the song ended on a decrescendo and Galavant left to change out of his serenading outfit, Richard raised an eyebrow conspiratorially at her and nodded in the direction their leader had just fled in.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Richard said. His beard was still smoking slightly despite the pitcher of water she’d dumped over his head to douse it. That had definitely been a mistake: now his leather doublet was clinging to his bare chest and she kept looking at his exposed collarbone.

“I don’t know. What are you thinking?” she answered, struggling to maintain eye contact. He beckoned to her and she leaned across the table. Another mistake: now he was wet, she wasn't wearing a real shirt, and their faces were far too close together.

“I’m thinking Galavant is trying to set us up,” he whispered. _You don’t say_ , she thought, the crumhorn still ringing in her ear. She forced herself to laugh.

“Good thing we didn’t take the bait,” she said. “…Right?”

“Right!” said Richard with satisfaction, leaning back and reaching for his silverware. “Now tell me, do you still peel all the crust off your bread because you think eating it will make your hair curl?”

Roberta rolled her eyes. “That was a valid fear! My hair is curly enough already, god knows I don’t need crust to encourage it.” By the time Galavant returned in time for dessert, they were both cackling uproariously as they went through each other’s silly childhood food habits. She kept her face as neutral as possible when he studied them both thoroughly for signs that his plan had worked.

 _Good thing I didn’t take the bait_ , she thought again, keeping her eyes away from Richard’s collarbone at all costs.

* * *

It became her mantra over the next few weeks.

Don’t take the bait when Richard makes you dismount just so he can untangle a burr from your hair that you hadn't spotted. Don’t take the bait when one of the blankets rots and you have to all crowd under one because Richard wanted to give you the spare but Galavant refused to share only with him. Don’t take the bait when you spend a night with a traveling polka band and Richard asks you to dance and slides his warm hands into yours and twirls you around the forest to the sputtering beat of a slightly flat tuba.

Forget Galavant; the whole universe seemed intent on forcing them into a roadtrip romantic comedy.

The worst part about it was the uncertainty. Richard liked her, of that she was sure, but was there some part of him that _like-_ liked her? When his hand brushed hers when handing her the reins, when he remembered that blue violets were her favorite flower, when he complimented her on her aim after she won a dart-throwing contest to get them a grand prize of one very fat and tasty possum, was he doing it on purpose? Or was she just imagining what it would be like if he really courted her? The answer was unclear, but she refused to give Galavant the satisfaction of being asked to be her wingman.

So instead she just pined in anguish.

“You know, Bobby,” Richard said to her one rainy afternoon as they huddled under a fallen log, waiting for Galavant return from negotiations with the bridge troll about joining his army, “I never apologized to you for all those summons back then.”

“What’s there to apologize for?” she asked, brushing away a stray raindrop from her forehead.

“For forcing kids to travel from Lord-knows-where just to hang around and let me win at everything for a few hours every week,” he said drily. “Don’t try to tell me you all actually had fun playing dodgeball against Gareth.”

Roberta flinched at the memory of taking a rubber ball right to the gut. “No, we didn’t. What I meant was why are you apologizing for this now? It’s been, god, thirty years! Most of those kids, myself included, have put it behind them.”

“I know.” They were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, and Tad Cooper scuttled off his arm and onto hers when Richard shrugged, unhappy at being dislodged. “I’m just trying to make as many things right as I can, I guess.” He smiled sadly at her. “Even if it’s too late.”

After a few days with that conversation rattling around in her head, Roberta reached a decision: she would have to confess. Even if Richard refused her, even if it ruined the friendship they'd built back up after a three-decade pause, she would have to confess she loved him. The realization that she'd have to admit her feelings aloud changed her attitude on being set up entirely. She was good with swords, not words. Now she would've put aside all the pride she had left and asked—no, begged—Galavant to be her wingman.

Of course, before she could pull him aside and do just that, Sid chose that moment to disobey the first rule she'd always drilled into her former students at the rec center: never hand off a sword blade-first.

* * *

Roberta had to hand it to the universe: it sure knew how to pick the worst possible time and place to stage a confession of love. She had hoped for it to happen by the sea at dawn, or perhaps somewhere with dramatic stained-glass lighting. Anywhere that wasn’t a damp, underground potion cavern that smelled like a mixture of sulfur and cough syrup, preferably without the freshly-cold corpse of a main character between her and the object of her affections. But if she didn’t tell him how she felt now, would she ever?

"That's not true. You've got me."

Her hands shook as she spoke. She felt brave. She felt terrified. She felt seven years old again, trying not to make a mess on a carpet she'd already soiled, hoping that a higher power would take pity and spare her.

Richard didn’t say anything. But he looked at her with such softness, such wonder, that she didn't need to hear his answer.

* * *

Their first time was rushed, fumbling, and embarrassing. She bit his tongue by accident. He elbowed her in the ribs when trying to unbutton his doublet. There was a lot of hair in mouths and both of them later found leaves in places they did not want to find leaves in.

It was (in both their words) absolutely, perfectly, completely wonderful.

* * *

And it was never going to last.

War was the biggest distinction between real life and fairytales. In a fairytale, a king would win the day, marry his true love, and live happily ever after. In a real battle, a king with no experience would lose all four limbs within minutes, have his head set on a pike and the rest of him left for the buzzards. Roberta had only one choice to make: would she rather her last memories of Richard be a breakup or a brutal slaughter?

It was a petty choice. Either way, he would be dead.

Roberta’s mother had often hinted to her that a small cottage near Great-Aunt Bertha’s farm on the Island of Spinster would be cheaper to rent than her home in town. “You could hang up your sword, dear,” she would say in that wheedling tone that all mothers seem to wield like a guilt-ridden whip, “and live a nice country life, without any reckless jousting, or bandit-hunting, or lobbying for universal elections. I worry about you; with Bobby settled in the east, you have so few friends. Great-Aunt Bertha and her bridge group would keep you plenty company, I’m sure!”

 _I guess I’ll have to learn to play bridge_ , Roberta thought as the shipmate called for priority passengers to begin boarding. She heard the card game was more complex than it seemed and that would suit her well. She needed something complicated to occupy her mind, because every time she closed her eyes she saw him, broken and bleeding—

“Now boarding B passengers only, B passengers to the Island of Spinster!”

She shook her head and reached for her ticket again, flapping the paper nervously. What was the use of getting upset now? It was done. By now the battle would be finished, Hortensia conquered by Queen Madalena, a new story begun without her. Roberta had never been meant to play a starring role in her own epic tale; her story began and ended with a king. Without him, there was no happy ending.

She fought down tears as she accepted her chocolate and carrier. This was the end. She would never see Richard again, never kiss him, never hear him call her—

“Roberta!”

…Well, yes, never hear him call her "Roberta," but she was going to say call her "Bobby." Kind of an odd move for her brain to change her inner dialogue but whatever, she was grieving. Grieving so well that she could practically hear his footsteps thundering down the dock.

“Wait!”

 _Look, Mum, you were right, I’ll make a great delusional old woman after all_ , she thought as she shifted her luggage to her other arm. _First day into mourning my boyfriend of less than a week and already I’m giving in to the hallucinations. In fact, I can imagine him so clearly that I’m going to turn around now, even though I know he won’t be there._

He was there.

He was there and he was gleaming and windswept and brilliant. He was alive.

Slowly, carefully, Roberta put down the cat.

* * *

The first time Roberta set foot in the tower bedchamber she was thirty-seven years old, long-haired, and not covered in anything. Part of her wanted to remedy that quickly, because for all its extravagance the castle was remarkably cold. She resisted both the urge to rub some warmth into her arms and the urge to give into her nerves and call this whole thing off. He may have rode through a night and a day to reach her before the ship sailed, may have kissed her senseless in front of some twenty-odd bingo fanatics, but the way Richard was staring at her now was confusing at best and extremely disheartening at worst. She shuffled her feet on the carpet, suppressing a shiver, and cleared her throat.

“Is there something wrong?” Her voice seemed to startle Richard out of his silent stupor.

“I just realized something,” he said, scratching his head a bit sheepishly. “The last time this happened, we were in the dark, in the woods, with most of our clothes still on because we were too blind and too drunk to figure out how buttons worked. So this is the first time I’ve ever seen you, well…” his eyes trailed down her body, then snapped back to her face, his cheeks reddening, “…naked."

Roberta felt herself blushing as well. “Technically,” she replied, "I’m not entirely naked yet.” She reached up, but Richard caught her hands. Pressing them between his own, he kissed her knuckles softly. Suddenly the drafty room felt very warm indeed.

“May I ask a favor, my queen?” he asked. When she nodded, Richard grinned. “Leave the crown on.”

Roberta drew herself to her full height and squared her shoulders, but she couldn't help grinning back.

“My king, I live to serve.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Can you believe that these old people wrecked me so bad that I actually started writing this a week before the finale aired and just hoped that the ending would fit how I wanted to finish it?
> 
> Spoiler: it did :')
> 
> NOTES!!  
> \- I really wanted to mimic the humor of the show without being too overly goofy, so this was a lot more tongue-in-cheek than how I usually write and I hope some of it was actually funny. If not…it's like 5k words, too bad.  
> \- Roberta's family background is completely made up, obviously. Choosing noble children to befriend a royal child is a real thing that has happened in many cultures throughout history so I put Roberta into the nobility to explain why exactly she'd be picked for Richard's Playdate Club.  
> \- If they can reference twitter in a song then I can make a character an otaku.  
> \- The timeline of the entire 2 seasons of Galavant is VERY FISHY and I did my best to figure out when stuff happened and for how long but ultimately it just became guesswork. I assumed that Richard and Madalena had been married for a few months before invading Valencia, and then the war itself probably took some time, so by the time Isabella arrived on Galavant's doorstep I assumed a year had passed and therefore dated the royal wedding at 1255: one year before Galavant states the canon date as 1256 to Jean Hamm at the joust.  
> \- In canon Richard and Roberta have a 5-year age difference as stated in "Bewitched, Bothered, and Belittled" but their actors are 46 and 35 respectively, so I said fuck it and nudged them into a medium 42 and 37 by the end of s2.  
> \- Yes I was bitter that Roberta didn't get a crown with her wedding outfit but I'm going to assume that Galavant and Isabella just got married first and that she gets one on her actual wedding/coronation day later. SHE DESERVES A CROWN!!  
> \- I mean no offense to the French.


End file.
